BillSaysThis

PSV must have decided before the opening whistle blew that they were never going to climb last week’s three goal hill visiting Anfield, or at least that’s the way they played. The Reds weren’t a whole lot more enthusiastic, with Craig Bellamy going off early with minor knee trouble lowering the motivation on the home side, but Peter Crouch was determined to keep his goal streak going and did.

Liverpool legend Robbie Fowler came on for Bellamy in the 17th minute and Fowler made the goal by getting the rebound off Crouch’s first shot and passing it back to the beanpole. The 68th minute goal was about the only serious attempt by either side. Rafa Benitez, looking at an overloaded schedule over the next month, rested Stephen Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Dirk Kuyt, Steve Finnan and Javer Mascherano and PSV boss Ronald Koemann had his own injury woes limiting his choices.

Chelsea scored an injury time winner last night to beat Valencia 1-2, coming back from an early 1-0 deficit, and so for the third straight season Liverpool will meet Roman Abramovich’s team in a cup quarterfinal. We’ve won the last two and I would be thrilled to see the boys make it three, though with Michael Essien and Joe Cole coming back from injury and Andre Schevchenko and Shaun Wright-Phillips getting in good form this is no easy task.

No matter. The Reds’ comebacks against Milan in the 2005 Champions League final and West Ham in last season’s FA Cup final show they’re a team that wants to win every time out.

What a great lunchtime treat today from Rafa, the two Stevies and ESPN2. The game started in slow motion and when I checked the game clock after about 11 minutes I thought I was trapped in some alternate universe where seconds are 2.23 times as long as our normal ones.

But no, it was just PSV Eindhoven coach Ronald Koeman having his side work for a nil-nil result. Jefferson Farfan as the lone man in the offensive end with everyone else packed in to stuff the Liverpool attack. The Reds responded in kind for the first 20 minutes or so, before deciding that their hot form warranted an aggressive strategy.

Steven Gerrard made it pay off with a smashing header off a Steve Finnan cross, jumping over a bent-over Dirk Kuyt. Liverpool kept up a bit of pressure but there were no more results in the half, with Peter Crouch having a tough time getting shots. As Tommy Smith pointed out, my boys are second only to Milan in number of shots in the Champions League, which you wouldn’t know from the first half. PSV, their hopes of 0-0 vanished, didn’t seem to have a plan B.

The second half was a different story and John Arne Riise got the second goal on a trademark left footed blast four minutes in. Tick tock, boys. Even Crouch got on the scoring sheet with a sweet header in the 63rd and though they had a few more chances, that was all there was. Fabio Aurelio was stretchered off after pulling up despite no one else being near him, with what appeared to be ruptured Achilles.

“We have no chance now,” PSV coach Ronald Koeman said. “If I can make my players believe we can still go through I don’t belong on this planet.” ROFL, eh? This is the coach who had been building a reputation as an England-killer after Benfica, where he coached last season, knocked out Manchester United and then Liverpool and dumping Arsenal in the round before this.

A couple of Liverpool Champions League club marks were set today: 3-0 was the biggest margin of victory in an away match, and Gerrard’s goal was his 15th, passing Ian Rush.

Return match is next Wednesday at Anfield but with three away goals and the quality of PSV play its hard to imagine that we won’t go through. Next round is against the winner of Chelsea-Valencia (a good Spanish team, which just happens to be the club previously managed by Liverpool’s current manager). Odds are still long but I can’t help wondering if the Reds will be raising the trophy in Athens in May!

This 2002 debut novel from Richard K. Morgan is a blast, combining Dashiel Hammet (down to its primary setting of San Francisco) and Bruce Sterling/William Gibson into a highly readable medium future melange highly reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick (whose fiction was the basis for movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and the upcoming Nicholas Cage-starrer Next). In fact, it won the 2003 Phillip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel originally published in the US as a paperback. Morgan is yet another topnotch British author.

Altered Carbon is the first part of a trilogy (fortunately the others are already out and in paperback) about Takeshi Kovacs set about 500 years from now. Key science fiction elements:

• Altered carbon, devised perhaps three centuries before this story opens and which Morgan does not explain at all, allows for cloning/quick growth of new bodies, though it remains expensive and so not generally available. Similarly sophisticated chemical engineering is also practiced.
• Cortical stacks, implanted at the base of the brain, store the essence of one’s self so one can be transferred to another body–either an altered carbon-based clone or the body of a person currently ‘in storage’ for being convicted of a crime, popularly referred to as sleeves. The stacks allow the criminal’s essence to be stored on computer disk for the term of the sentence with no guarantee of the original body’s availability afterwards since sentences can run more than a hundred years.
• AIs, intelligent computers, exist but in limited numbers and tightly controlled circumstances. Kovacs stays in The Hendrix, a hotel controlled (inhabited?) by one.
• Humans have settled several worlds beyond Earth through slower than light travel, Takeshi having been born on Harlan’s World, but instantaneous communication permits a single, United Nations-derived government as well as the transmission of stored essences for download into a local sleeve.

Indeed, a needlecast is what brings Kovacs to Earth. Our man is an extremely tough guy over a hundred years old (though he’s only experienced about 40, the rest having past in storage), born into a ghetto gang and escaping into the UN military where he’s eventually drafted into the Envoy Corps, an elite force combining diplomatic psychology, chemically-enhanced body control and special forces training. Envoy work is soul-destroying and since most jobs are out of bounds because of the perceived advantages the enhancements give, many turn to crime after leaving the service.

A wealthy methuselah, a person named Laurens Bancroft who’s lived 350 years continuously through a series of altered carbon clones, pays for Kovacs to be transmitted and resleeved in order to investigate why Bancroft seemingly killed himself just before. Having multiple clones and automatic stack backups the body death only cost him two days of memories but he can’t accept the explanation that he did it to himself, the ‘meth’ unable to conceive of any logical explanation.

Kovacs being who he is and Bancroft having resleeved him in the body of a corrupt police detective called Ryker, the path from arrival to uncovering the truth and the actions taken in reponse is engagingly tangled. We travel from the ultra-privileged through police working in an ultimately corrupt democratic regime down through the least privileged strata and back up to the level of global politics, our protagonist moving ruthlessly to earn his promised payment while trying to help the downtrodden he encounters and hurt their abusers.

Morgan has done well in embedding the hardboiled noir detective work, giving us multiple beautiful (and intelligent) women, dangerous red herrings, antagonists from both Kovacs’ and Ryker’s pasts and an answer to the why that makes sense but was unpredictable. The writing is colorful, the plot swirling excellently tighter and tighter and the characters compelling making it difficult for me to put Altered Carbon down.

definitely recommended

Koders.com is a new source code search engine. I’ve seen a number of favorable blogosphere writeups, which makes me wonder why their PR contact, Scott Howard at Milani Marketing, is spamming me about it through my contact form. Howard’s bio claims 12 years experience working for companies from startup through global delivery so one could expect a bit more cluefullness.

No doubt I’m a good target for what I presume is their blog marketing campaign, but when the message sent is completely generic and doesn’t get any personalization, not even a simple Dear Bill at the top, then in my book that’s unwanted spam.

Too bad.

Update: I received two email apologies from Howard and a manager at Koders. I still don’t care for the approach but at least they owned up to the mistake.

I was supposed to go to Startup School today over at Stanford but, with apologies to Paul Graham and crew and despite the outstanding speaker lineup, after the past week I just didn’t feel like sitting in a huge auditorium with five hundred or so not so close friends.

So TS1 and I took off late morning to drive to Half Moon Bay. I love driving on 280, it’s always wide open and the scenery is just beautiful. Green hills, towering trees, low-hanging clouds riding atop the mountain ridge like frosting on a cake. Amazingly, my sweetie’s never really been there despite living in SF or MtnVw her entire life. I lived a few miles north, in El Granada, just after moving out here but haven’t been back much since.

We had a pretty nice lunch at Pasta Moon to celebrate my recent hiring and some good news of her own at work. One word of advice: the guy at the next table ordered the lasagna and it was fraking huge! Think of the huge piles of meat sandwiches served at, say, Carnegie Deli and translate that to lasagna. Seriously, the thing must have been six inches high or more. So if you want to have it, pay the $2 sharing charge and go halves.

Afterwards we walked up and down Main St., window shopping or browsing. There are few nice stores there, one in particular tempted us with fine wood offerings but our credit card stayed in the wallet. The downside to HMB is that, while it was a beautiful sunny day here the clouds were closing in there and since I’m still recovering from the strep we only walked for about an hour.

What a nice break, away from computers, work and TVs with my sweetie!

So I get this great new job two weeks ago and–boom–Saturday afternoon I start getting sick. Yesterday I was feeling better, went over for a long meeting with the boss, but after dinner things went down hill fast. Coughing, fever, bad sore throat, even chills. Seriously, couldn’t the bugs have waited until next month or something?

Don’t want to say too much about the new gig yet. We’re a very early stage startup, working each on our own, with a really exciting consumer product coming out in the very near future. The co-founders both have impressive track records with previous entrepreneurial ventures and one was an angel investor in RawSugar, which is where the connection came from. My responsibilities are customer support and right now that means helping to build the infrastructure and pumping up the help content. And eating our dog food, as the saying goes, working with our core product every day–it’s tasty.

Sure hope the doc’s prescription kicks in fast, there aren’t enough hours in the day anyway.

We were very fortunate to have David Akov, the Israeli Consul General for the Pacific Northwest, as our guest. Mr. Akov gave us his perspective on what’s been happening with Israel and its neighbors over the last two and a half years and how the region has changed, particularly since 9/11, from Arabs versus Jews to religious moderates versus religious extremists.

Akov presented his thesis as a series of benchmarks (or milestones, I don’t recall the exactw wording) beginning with the decision by then-Prime Minister Sharon and his government to change Israel’s process to one of unilateral disengagement, starting by a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The leadership had hoped after the death of Yasir Arafat that the Palestineans would realize it was in their own best interest to turn away from terrorism but sadly that didn’t happen; seeing no partner on the other side with whom they could deal, the decision was made to move ahead anyway.

Sharon found that he had lost a big chunk of his Likud Party membership over this and so he split off and formed Kadima–the first time a nation’s governing leader bolted his own party midterm! Only a few weeks later Sharon had a massive stroke and he remains to this day comatose but his new party won the largest number of seats in the subsequent elections and formed a government with left-leaning Labor.

Jump ahead to last summer when Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon each kidnapped Israeli soldiers and in response the Israeli Defense Force invaded both territories. Akov said that, despite some perception that it was otherwise, he felt Israel achieved its most important goal in Lebanon.

Hezbollah (and other groups) now understand that if they cross a certain line there will be a major price to pay. Hezbollah had nearly its entire infrastructure expended or destroyed and a joint United Nations-Lebanese Army peacekeeping force is in place in southern Lebanon, providing a substantial buffer that has blocked the terrorists from launching rockets and other attacks into northern Israel.

The Palestineans, meanwhile, have seen their cause slip from the major casus belli to secondary due to the war in Iraq. The sectarian conflict there is starting to show moderates in the Arab world, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and even, to a lesser extent, Syria, that Israel isn’t their biggest problem. The real danger is from the radical Islamic groups, who, as John Robb has pointed out time and again, are just as opposed to the House of Saud as to the State of Israel.

The only way out, Akov told us, is a combination of carrot and stick. That is, enable and encourage the moderates to step up to the plate against the suicide bombers. Which ought to, closing the circle to my opening ‘graphs, develop a partner with whom Israel and the West can negotiate peace. Real peace.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything he said but certainly he’s more in touch and involved with these events than me, plus there had to be some element of his being constrained by his position as an official of the government of Israel.

Once again, thanks to Fenwick & West, especially Barry Kramer, Steve Levine, Randall Farmer and Kathy Dore, for sponsoring our use of their terrific meeting facilities.

Next meeting is set for May 8 when I hope to have an event focused on Nanotechnology. Please try and join us if you can, our events are free and open to the general public.

Neil Gaiman is extremely popular among a large subset of science fiction fandom but an author I’d never really gotten into before. Another one of TS1’s holiday presents to me was his 2001 novel American Gods and, I have to say, I was quite enjoyed his quasi-realistic take on what would happen to our ancestor’s deities as they too emigrated to this hard cold land. Don’t take my word for it, though, since the book won several major awards:

• Hugo Award for Best SF/Fantasy Novel
• Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel
• Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
• Nebula Award for Best Novel

That’s pretty much a grand slam, eh? So of course there’s a sequel I need to find now.

What we have here is a story about a man named Shadow, his real name never really given, who meet on the day he’s released from prison. Which is actually two days ahead of schedule, because the love of his life, his wife Laura, has died in a car crash and the powers that be had some compassion. Or, more likely, other motives.

Shadow hooks up with Mr. Wednesday, a very strange man, to work as his driver, errand boy and muscle if needed. Mr. Wednesday, which both is and isn’t really his name, needs to be driven all over the United States for meetings with people as strange as he. People, like Wednesday, who are what’s left of the gods of our old countries after the folk who brought them to life with the power of their belief no longer really believe.

Gaiman put a lot of thought into who these gods would be in our day and age (con men, hookers, morticians) as well as what gods would arise from our modern beliefs (bankers, geeks, sui generis TV stars) and tells the tale of what would happen if the two groups felt the need to fight a winner take all battle.

Unpredictable, enjoyable, highly readable.

recommended

I had a very interesting lunch today, and was sitting about 20-25 from a Valley billionaire. Though I didn’t have the chance to speak with him.

Arsenal goes down again! Came home from that to watch the Blackburn-Arsenal fourth round FA up replay and saw Benny McCarthy’s brilliant late goal to give Wenger’s Wangers their third straight defeat. Now, Mark Hughes, please take your South African striker out of the doghouse and put him back in the starting side.

BBC America had another great political thriller last week, a 7.7 hour/three parter called The State Within. Jason Isaacs is the big name in the cast but there are plenty of good performances, including Ben Daniels, Lennie James, Eva Birthistle and Sharon Gless as the US Secretary of Defense with two foot thick armor. The show was written by Lizzie Mickery and Daniel Percival, who penned 2004’s also very good and disturbing Dirty War. If you get the chance, definitely watch.

The BeebAmerica premieres a new Robin Hood series Saturday night, looks like it could be decent though I do wonder how it will differ from the gazillion previous filmed versions of the tale.

Star Trek XI will be out for Christmas next year, directed by JJ Abrams and co-written by two of his crew (who also did Mission: Impossible III with him last year). The story will feature Kirk, Spock and Bones during their Starfleet Academy years, possibly a reboot of the mythology as Abrams has said he will honor but not be held hostage to the past.

I have both Akismet and Bad Behavior installed on a couple of WordPress blogs here and the spammers are getting the upper hand lately, if my experience is common, with several recent fake trackbacks evading both plugins. Five new messages have been posted to your blog emails have come in while I wrote this brief post, all spam, all from the same IP address.

I was at last Wednesday’s Lunch 2.0 at Yahoo! Santa Clara, heard the brief remarks about YPN, MyBlogLog and Yahoo! Pipes (here is a simple Pipe I made). There is photographic evidence I was paying attention:

• Surprises: Pan’s Labyrinth losing Foreign Picture, Melissa Etheridge beating the Dreamgirls trio, Alan Arkin’s dignified acceptance speech
• Fine choices: Martin Scorsese finally getting the little golden man, Happy Feet and An Inconvenient Truth
• Weird: William Monahan clearly used too much Valium, Ellen Degeneres as usual

Overall this was definitely one of the better Oscar shows I can recall. The historical montages for Best Foreign Films, America and Errico Morricone were excellent, though I could have lived many more years without hearing Celine Dion singing any song.

We didn’t see too many of the major nominees, hence the lack of predictions this year. With the sweet new hi-def screen that trend is likely to continue.

If you think I’ve got a typo in the post title, if you’re seeing “Barcelona 1-2 Liverpool” then there is no typo. Just 90 minutes of atypically poor defense and confusion in the final third from the reigning European and Spanish champions who did indeed lose at home to my wonderful Reds today in the first leg of their Round of 16 Champions League match.

Though the home side scored first with a good header from Deco off a cross by Gianlucca Zambrotta in the 14th minute and my guys looked to be mired in a swamp for the next 15-20 minutes, we persevered and took over the run of play for the least third of the half, with the payoff coming on a beautifully weighted cross from Zabi Alonso to Craig Bellamy left in space at the far post. Victor Valdes tried vainly to keep the ball from crossing completely over the line as he slid backwards into his own goal but only pushed it weakly to the feet of Dirk Kuyt, who tapped in for insurance, though the officials credited the equalizer to Bellamy’s effort.

In the second half Frank Rijkaard tried to use his world class firepower to get the winner, bringing on Iniesta (who after all got the winner in the recent Spain-England friendly) and then Giuly in place of his two central midfielders and, towards the end, swapping a tired, frustrated Saviola for Eider Gudjonson, but this just put too many cooks on the field and did nothing to strengthen the questionable back line.

Of course my favorite Merseysider, John Arne Riise, pushed up as a fifth midfielder, was the one who blasted home the winning goal in the 74th. Dirk Kuyt got in alone at the center of Valdes’ 18 yard box, neither centerback taking him on, and though the Barca keeper stopped our Dutchman, Rafa Marquez’s header dropped right at the feet of Bellamy 16 yards out. Bellamy one touched to Riise, all alone at the other side of the box, and the Norwegian spun his powerful right leg to slam the ball in.

Even with four minutes of injury time and screams of the Nou Camp faithful the Spainards barely caused any work for Pepe Reina. I have to say, I was screaming at the end, in joy.

Bonus glee: I watched PSV Eindhoven defeat Arsenal 1-0 yesterday. There was no magic in Henry’s boots and, as with Ronaldinho today, the world class star never really got into the game.

Second leg of this round is in two weeks. On March 6, if Liverpool get a win or draw, no matter the number of goals, or even lose 1-0 or 2-1, they will go through and Barcelona is done. GO REDS!!!

This is a huge anthology, a not quite academic attempt to document just what people mean when they call a work of science fiction “space opera” and how that’s changed over the last 80 years. By document, I mean the husband and wife team of David G. Hartwell and Katherine Kramer have assembled 32 short stories and novellas that are among the best examples of the subgenre (or represent key authors) and added an introductory essay along with brief introductions for each piece.

The Space Opera Renaissance is massive, nearly a 1,000 pages, and I was fortunate to have TS1 buy it for me as a holiday present; okay, I put it on my gift list, she wouldn’t have known about it otherwise, but it was a great gift. The stories reach back to the late 1920s, before the name science fiction even came into use, and early ’30s with Edmond Hamilton’s “The Star Stealers” and “The Prince of Space” by Jack Williamson, both excellent examples of spacelanes shoot-em ups and the clear progenitors of Star Trek and Star Wars.

Up until about the end of World War II–and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan–this type of story was the stock in trade of the low end pulp magazines, but would rarely be found in ‘prestige’ publications like Astounding Scienc Fiction (later renamed Analog Science Fiction and Fact, under which it still publishes today). Plays to the masses, rather than quality. Williamson, amazingly, remained an active, respected sf writer well into his 90s, almost to the day he died last November, winning the Hugo for Best Novella in 2001 at age 94!

Space opera, tales of more than human heros saving the day/planet/humanity/galaxy from destruction by a combination of intelligence, wit and military might, fell into even greater disrepute over the next decades, becoming almost an epithet and reaching its nadir at the hands of the British New Wave authors of the 1960s such as Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard. These writers, along with Americans like Damon Knight, urged their peers to turn away from fleets of spaceships and evil aliens and towards an examination of the near future and how we might face the dangers dangling over us. The anthology, with sparse pickings, has only three stories from that time; I particularly enjoyed the highly influential Samuel R. Delany offering, “Empire Star”.

In the wake of Star Trek and Star Wars writers began returning to galactic-level action until today space opera, having subsumed the criticisms, has become perhaps the dominant subgenre of science fiction. Not only in sales, which I’ve little doubt that all the books set in the two Star universes prove, but in quality of authors and work. Almost all of my current favorite writers, like Stross, Hamilton, Macleod, Banks, Bujold, work largely in this form; heck, for many years I read pretty much every Star Trek novel Pocket Books put out.

So the bulk of The Space Opera Renaissance is pieces from the last 30 years, reasonable as the author’s stated aim is to show the breadth of this rebirth. Hartwell and Kramer include lots of the big names: David Brin, David Drake, Dan Simmons, David Webber, Catherine Asaro, Allen Steele, Gregory Benford, Don Kingsley, Sarah Zettel, Robert Reed, Paul McAuley, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and each of my fave five.

Most of these stories are excellent and the styles range over a broad territory, providing coverage of just how much diversity exists in today’s space opera tent. The Webber, for instance, gives the origin of his hugely popular Honor Harrington character (I suppose, I haven’t read any of the books, though I have read his Dahak trilogy) and the Bujold does similar for Miles Vorkosigian, and I have read all of that series. Simmons, Steele, Reed and McAuley are all new reads for me, mostly excellent.

Also included are Michael Moorcock, who falls on the Leigh Brackett fantasy side of the ledger, and hence doesn’t appeal to me and even Ursula K. Leguin who, I think, really does not belong here. “The Shobies’ Story” is a good one, but isn’t space opera unless the definition is stretched so thin that it has little meaning; I very much enjoyed Ansaro’s quite alien, award-winning novella but will say the same about its inclusion.

For my money this is an excellent book. If you aren’t familiar with all of the authors then this will introduce you to them painlessly and other stories, some you’ve surely read before, will bring back pleasant memories. I plan on reading more works of several.

highly recommended

Nancy Kress came into her own with this novel (which is the first of a trilogy, something I didn’t know until checking up for this post), winning the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1993 for the novella in which it originated. The book is more of a quartet of novellas than a single novel-length story, though this made no difference to my enjoyment of it.

Beggars in Spain, which begins in 2008, takes two ingredients from the science fiction counter: human genetic engineering is widely available and here we’re specifically concerned with a genemod that removes the need–and ability–to sleep, and a cheap, apparently unlimited source of energy has become available. The so-called Sleepless, partially due to other genemods and partially due to the other effects of removing the need to sleep, are smarter and healthier than Sleepers, plus they have that extra eight hours a day to get things done.

In the increasingly economically stratified American society, the Sleepers increasingly dislike these new folk, and dislike turns to hate and then to persecution and outright discrimination. Because the genemod is expensive and early experience shows that the Sleepless are hated even by their own parents, only a few thousand are ever engineered though, not surprisingly, the trait is a dominant one and generally inherited by offspring.

Kress also throws in the highly individualistic, even Randian, philosophy of Kenzo Yagai, the man who developed that cheap source of energy, which appeals greatly to the Sleepers. This is where the title comes from: if you’re walking down a street in Spain and one beggar asks you for money, do you give it to him? What about the second beggar? What if there are 100 beggars? In other words, what claim do the weak (i.e., unproductive) have on the strong?

Kress heightens the conflict by extrapolating the bread and circuses trend of mindless living, exacerbated by the massive loss of jobs to automation (and presumably cheaper labor elsewhere, though the story itself barely mentions the world outside of America) which is counterbalanced by the patent royalties on Yagai’s inventions, which he has given to the American government. Most people, by the end of the story, do little but party, watch sports, eat and sleep; a small percentage, the donkeys, run the corporations and government.

The Sleepers, with a handful of exceptions, despise and fear the Sleepers and physically isolate themselves, first in an enclave in upstate New York and later in an orbital habitat. Their intelligence and sense of purpose, plus having started out generally well off anyway, lead them to become an immensely wealthy clan, financially equal to any nation, but their small numbers and cultural position mean their political power is nowhere near commensurate with their economic status.

Beggars is clearly an attempt by Kress to debate the meaning of community and the best balance of group and individual. She closes by having her main character summarizing it to a young woman who is Sleepless and something more: “[We] saw that it’s not possible to have both equality, which is just another name for community sollidarity, and individual excellence.“

recommended

I’ve been working on two projects the last couple of weeks, plus of course job hunting, and that’s kept me from blogging. But the Grammys are on the tube and boring the heck out of me–why did everyone make such a big deal about the Police reuniting to open the show and then the group only plays Roxanne? The band slowed down the tempo, robbing it of its urgency, and lowered the key, I guess Sting, for all his pumped muscles, can’t quite reach the high notes of 30 years ago. Ugh.

One project I’ve got in the pipeline is for a volunteer group newly-elected Mountain View City Council member Jac Siegel has organized called Community Helping Community. I’m developing a small application to handle volunteer signups and event postings using Ruby on Rails and MySQL. Hopefully you’ll be able to see it soon, if I figure out a few tricky-ish things.

The other project is (yay!) a small consulting job for a venture funded Israeli startup. First task is setting up a WordPress blog for the company, which is mostly done, and then on an ongoing basis write the blog as well as help the company participate in the web conversations surrounding them and their areas of expertise.

I was hoping to get an offer from a very exciting startup company based on a strong open source project but it didn’t happen, some of the managers felt the position required a level of technical (Java programming) competence which I don’t have. Though my own opinion is different and so this outcome was disappointing.

I did have a good morning of interviews for another position two days later and this too seems interesting, a good match for my skills and experience while offering the opportunity to exercise my leadership, creativity and imagination. I’m an optimist and always expect the good outcome.

So, life is good, eh? Still, if you know of a good position or need some consulting help don’t hesitate to reach out.

[previous entries]

Fry’s did deliver the new TV as scheduled and of course it made absolutely no difference in the problem (of having to power cycle the Comcast box or unplug/plug the HDMI cable). What a fracking waste of their money and time, and a bit of my time, but that’s the stupid low level thinking Fry’s always seems to show. No doubt they are a very profitable business, so it must work for them, but I’ve yet to meet a customer or floor worker who likes it.

In fact now that the 30 day wait period is expired I may call again and this time they will have to send a repair person out. Doubtful that this will have any chance of a real solution, but not my problem.

Comcast gave me a new HD DVR and, with help from an online support rep, I got the two missing channels. Actually the Universal HD channel turns out to be quite useful since I’m catching up on the two Law & Order spinoffs, Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent, which I’d never watched before, plus it has a bunch of SciFi channel shows that are cool to watch in high def.

There was a bit of panty twisting with the cable company before this pleasant resolution. In order to try and force the set top box to show UHD and MTVhd the rep sent it a reset signal but afterwards I no longer got FoxSoccer Channel or Starz. The rep claimed these were simply not part of my package, despite having received them for years and through any number of reset signals, and restoring them would cost an additional $15 a month.

Ha! You readers surely now by now my sense of entitlement would not let that stand and I pushed back. The rep went off to confer with the supervisor, for more than ten minutes, long enough that I thought he just blew me off, but the rep (whose name I wasn’t really given) turned out to be a good advocate for my request and a very good public face for Comcast.

He said that the Starz would just be turned back on, which I could see had already happened, though to get FSC I’d need the sports add-on at $4.95 a month. However, Comcast would waive the $6.95 a month box rental fee! Very nice, eh? I get a few additional channels–GolTV being by far the most interesting, with lots of Spanish, German and other international league football coverage, albeit in Spanish–and save $2 a month.

The new report card:

• Fry’s: F, no change, though I’d make it lower if the American school system had it
• Olevia: B-, up from C, because I’m really loving the HD
• Comcast: A-, up from C+, thanks to some great customer service–and will go higher if the promised TiVo service is $5 a month or less

As part of straightening out my issues with Comcast and HD, I ended up getting the Spanish language channel football network GolTV and watched an entire match today, with La Liga leading (and reigning Europe champion) Barcelona FC visiting bottom dwelling Real Betis.

Barca is missing a bunch of players through injury, including strikers Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi, but given their lineup I still expected them to dominate the game. Real Betis was the bright team this day, scoring first and holding on for the 1-1 draw. The hosts were much more aggressive and their midfielder Assuncao took some blistering wicked free kicks that came very close to sneaking just inside Victor Valdes’ post.

Frankly, if this is the team that shows up against Liverpool in four weeks for the Champions League round then I think our club has a much better chance to go through than before I watched the game. Ronaldinho still has not regained his rampant form of the last two seasons and Deco was rarely able to connect with Saviola and Giuly upfront; however Eto’o and Messi may both be back by then so I doubt the Reds will have an easy time as Real Betis did today.